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1 August 2007

Birthday Non-Celebrations

MTV turns 26 today. This feels wrong somehow: MTV can't be two and a bit years older thanme. Maybe it feels so strange because I was somewhat of a late bloomer when it came to pop music (unlike so many other things) and other than Oasis, Blur and Radiohead, I didn't really listen to anything much until I was about 13. I therefore associate MTV with the late '90s and on.

Then, we got Sky and I got into pop music (correlation? causation?) in a big way and would frequently record favourite songs from the Top 40 countdown on Radio 1 at least every other week (years later I rediscovered all of these tapes containing the same songs over and over, which plummeted into the bin). That didn't stop me buying hundreds of singles at £2.99 a pop (had to put my lunch money towards something useful); looking back now at the obsolete CD singles, I realise I had terrible taste in music way back when.

It took a while to recover from this MTV/Radio 1 onslaught, largely helped by Dawson's Creek (embarrassingly; the show did have great taste in music though) and then later Radio Paradise and The O.C. I can't stand most of the stuff in the charts these days. I hate most pop and I hate R & B and films, friends and RP are pretty much my only sources of new music. As I tend to listen to my iPod anyway and specifically to the same songs over and over, this isn't too much of a problem.

Anyway, Happy Birthday MTV (whose website doesn't seem to be advertising this in anyway - must be a common problem)! I hope I am not as ambivalent towards myself at 26 as I am towards MTV now.